The history of the Devil in early modern England has tended to be the history of the demonization of witches, a focus that has often interpreted the concept as, at best an inheritance, at worst a leftover from the late medieval world.Footnote 1 From the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Devil had assumed a position of great significance and power in Europe as the focus of Christian discourses of scapegoating and “othering.”Footnote 2 He was identified at the head of an anti-Christian plot that encompassed Jews and heretics.Footnote 3 This persecutory mentality crystallized, in the fifteenth century, in the transformation of sorcery trials from the punishment of single necromancers to the purging of networks of witches.Footnote 4 In early modern England the narrative of the witches' Sabbat never gained ascendancy. But witches, historians argue, continued to be the objects of the tendency to project evil onto marginalized groups. The significance of the early modern English Devil thus lies in the maintenance of these established antifigures. As Peter Lake and J. C. Davis have shown, similar processes of “othering” also enabled the creation of new antifigures such as Catholics or Ranters.Footnote 5
This picture of continuity appears to be borne out by Reformation theology, in which the Devil maintained a seemingly paradoxical place. On the one hand, the reformers’ emphasis on complete divine sovereignty should have seriously challenged Christianity's more dualist tendencies. But on the other, Protestantism was too driven by a profound sense of human sin to be able to jettison the Devil.Footnote 6 For Jeffrey Burton Russell the nature of this inheritance, in which the reformers “uncritically accepted virtually the entire of medieval diabology,” is demonstrated by its precariousness. The vitality of the concept was increasingly lost in the face of a developing willingness to attribute evil to purely human causes, and the Devil ultimately succumbed to the modernism of the Enlightenment. Thus the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw, in Russell's words, “the Devil between two worlds.”Footnote 7 Similarly, the study of Protestant demonology in England has largely been an exploration of the belief system that continued to make possible the fantasy of the witches’ pact. Keith Thomas has argued that Protestants experienced a sense of powerlessness in the face of evil. Thus they were perhaps even more prepared to project their religious despair and prohibited desires onto a crude personification of evil in the shape of a black man or strange animal. In this intellectual climate, “the belief that witches might make compacts with Satan is readily intelligible.”Footnote 8 While positing very different interpretations from that of Thomas, more recent work on the meaning of witchcraft has continued to examine Protestant demonology within this broad context.Footnote 9 More widely, John Stachniewski's study of Puritan writings has concentrated on the centrality of the Devil to the godly culture of despair, while Richard Godbeer has argued that Satan was an effective barometer of religious confidence, the most assured having the least need to project their sins onto him.Footnote 10
Thus the predominant model of demonology in early modern England has defined it as a device by which those negative aspects of life, and psychology, from which people sought to be distanced, might be projected onto a familiar symbol of transcendent evil, enabling moral and social norms to be reinforced by inversion. However, this approach seriously distorts our picture of demonism through its reliance on a limited source base. On the one hand, Jeffrey Burton Russell, working in the history of ideas, examines the Devil as an explanation for evil in the works of a handful of major theologians and writers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, William Shakespeare, and John Milton.Footnote 11 On the other, social historians have understood the demonization of witches, with its lethal consequences, to be the most significant expression of demonological beliefs, and so have concentrated on a small number of theoretical witch tracts and pamphlet narratives.Footnote 12 However, while these studies present an accurate picture of the Devil within witch-beliefs, their assumption that it is representative of a more general demonism in early modern England is not borne out by the study of a wider source base. The Devil pervaded the written culture of early modern England, in tracts, sermons, devotional and conduct literature, plays and ballads, as well as in diaries and commonplace books. Recent work, focusing on these sources, has begun to redress the imbalance, arguing for the existence of a characteristically Protestant concept of the Devil that was centerd around the notion of temptation.Footnote 13 Temptation had, of course, been central to the concept of the Devil throughout Christian history. Protestant demonism thus involved a change of emphasis rather than of theology, but the change was highly significant. Whereas the medieval remit of the Devil had included temptation as one of a variety of activities with which he might afflict mankind, Protestants elevated it into the single most important aspect of his agency, which virtually eclipsed all others. It may, therefore, be useful to distinguish between the “academic” “demonology” of witch-texts and pamphlets and a broader “demonism.” The first intensively sought to delineate diabolic activity in one sphere. It was arguably constrained within the parameters set by explaining the nature and significance of witchcraft, and required that the Devil's physical presence be demonstrated as a mechanism of the witch's fall into apostasy. The second was a more nebulous belief that, starting from an a priori acceptance of the reality of pervasive satanic activity, compiled and described the wide experience of diabolic agency around a small number of central emphases, of which temptation was the most prominent. Demonology and this more general demonism were, of course, interrelated. As Stuart Clark has noted, Protestant witch-texts were written by the pastorate, within the broader context of the reformation of manners.Footnote 14 But while the depiction of satanic agency was fully consistent between them, they represented very different aspects of the Protestant agenda. The Devil's work in tempting witches might be a striking demonstration of the iniquity of the times, proof, as Clark has observed, that these were the Last Days.Footnote 15 As such, however, witchcraft was an extreme example of Protestant pastoral concerns. For the most part these identified the norm of diabolic agency in less extraordinary occurrences such as temptation.Footnote 16
However, while the work of historians such as Frank Luttmer and Darren Oldridge has provided a much more sophisticated and nuanced picture of Protestant demonism, it has continued to interpret it within the functionalist oppositional schema. Luttmer argues that Protestant divines posited a “vast” distinction between the regenerate and unregenerate in their relationship with the Devil, which was central to the definition of spiritual “contrariety” by which they formed their identity.Footnote 17 Similarly, Oldridge has argued that the godly's sense of being an embattled minority encouraged a preoccupation with the Devil, but that Protestants were also forced into an uneasy accommodation with surviving popular beliefs in areas such as witchcraft and possession.Footnote 18
This article will argue that the English Protestant conception of the Devil in fact suggests that the position of notions such as “otherness” and inversion in early modern culture should be reconsidered. In the light of Stuart Clark's seminal work on contrariety, oppositional discourses have been viewed as a defining element of early modern European culture, perhaps even an automatic way of thought.Footnote 19 The Devil himself has been interpreted as the archetypal product of this mentality, and so described as having only a “contingent reality.” He was “God's ape,” existing and understood only in terms of what he was not, and incapable of being felt as a real force.Footnote 20 But Protestant demonism in England points to the fact that oppositional discourses were not automatic, and indeed had often to be carefully constructed. The Protestant emphasis on the intimacy of the individual's relationship with Satan, and on temptation in particular, mitigated against easy notions of “otherness” and inversion. Temptation was central to Protestant demonism because it could be understood experientially in a way that far less common physical manifestations could not. While Protestant demonism had its antecedents in the devotional works of writers such as St. Augustine, Gregory the Great, and the medieval mystics, its characteristics were shaped by the very experience of the Reformation. As the reformers came to terms with a realization that the religion they had once embraced was thoroughly corrupted by Satan, they concluded that his most dangerous agency lay hidden in the commonplace—the apparently harmless and even superficially pious. This combined with their sense of personal struggle with the diabolic to make the Devil's power to enter directly into the consciousness the archetype of his agency. He could introduce sinful thoughts into the mind, or take hold on man's corrupted will and turn him to sin. This understanding was intended to allow Satan's power to be felt within the life of every Christian, and demanded an empathic engagement with the experience of “sin,” rather than a separation from it. Moreover, it taught Christians that the difference between the regenerate and reprobate lay only in their response to the shared experience of temptation. Thus Protestant demonism was predicated on a satanic reality that was experiential rather than contingent. But Protestants were not left powerless against Satan. Instead demonism was assimilated into a soteriological scheme that sought to make temptation manageable by interpreting it as a sign of election. This had implications for the function of the ministry, which challenges the traditional interpretation that the Reformation reduced clerical status.
In setting out this argument I would identify two areas that are beyond the scope of this present article. First, this interpretation emerges from an in-depth study of the Devil in post-Reformation English culture, and does not address Protestant demonism in continental Europe. The analysis presented here is thus offered as a suggestive model to be compared and contrasted with demonism expressed in other countries. Second, in describing the Protestant internalization of the Devil's agency, this study does not seek to argue that internal temptation was not also a prominent aspect of post-Tridentine Catholicism.Footnote 21 A provisional examination of this area suggests that, while Catholic devotional works circulating in early modern England accorded a high profile to internal temptation, it did not eclipse other aspects of diabolic agency. Moreover, Catholic works maintained an emphasis on the conquest of temptation, and the role of ceremony and intercession within this context, in contrast to the Protestant emphasis on temptation as an inescapable condition of a godly life.Footnote 22
I
Historians, such as Jeffrey Burton Russell and Keith Thomas, have tended to see Protestantism as hostage to the Devil. Its introspective tendencies emphasized personal sin, while its attack on established religious corporatism removed the ceremonial mechanisms and communal support that could once have been used to ward Satan off. However, this argument ignores the extent to which the concept was reshaped by a more subtle realignment of emphasis rather than a conscious overhauling. In England, demonism was not reformed in the sense that Eucharistic piety or the cult of the saints were reformed. There was no attempt to alter the fundamentals of belief in the Devil or to deny him the power he had previously been accorded. Indeed the major writers of the early Reformation produced no dedicated works of demonology, and, even including witchcraft texts, such works remained rare throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mainstream Protestant writing was, however, pervaded by a profound sense of the Devil's power. Anti-Catholic polemic, devotional writings, catechisms, conduct books, and sermons hammered home the view that a man's life on earth was characterized by a constant and intimate relationship with Satan.Footnote 23 In this sense demonism was part of the totality of Protestant understanding, not to be compartmentalized by a focus on abstract demonology or witchcraft. Thus the dedicated studies of the Devil that began to emerge in the later sixteenth century were compendia of the demonism that was already expressed in theological and devotional literature.Footnote 24
Protestant demonism reflected the intensely personalized experiences of the reformers, and two aspects were especially important. First, their sense of struggling personally against an enveloping diabolism focused their attention very firmly on Satan's earthly rather than cosmic agency. It is striking how little the reformers were interested in the question of theodicy. Lucifer's rebellion had, in all probability, introduced evil into the cosmos, but, according to John Calvin, scripture's failure to give a detailed exposition of the Devil's fall indicated that it was “of no consequence to us.” Instead the Bible elaborated on Satan's earthly activity and gave consequence solely to his power over individual men. “The tendency of all that scripture teaches us concerning devils is to put us on our guard against their wiles and machinations,” Calvin explained, “the object of these descriptions is to make us more cautious and vigilant, and more prepared for the contest.”Footnote 25
This experiential approach to the Devil was followed in virtually all English Protestant writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hugh Latimer, preaching in 1537, declared, “I cannot wholly express him. … I wot not what to call him. … This alone can I say grossly, and as a sum of all we have experience, the Devil to be a stinking sentine of all vices; a foul filthy channel of all mischiefs.”Footnote 26 Similarly, Thomas Cranmer observed in 1548 that Satan's evils were “without number, and increase daily more and more,” and listed among them “sadness, sorrow, trouble of conscience, faintness of heart, sickness of the body, poverty, slanders, despising, reproaches, persecutions, battle, sedition, hunger, pestilence and all plagues.”Footnote 27 For William Perkins, writing toward the end of the sixteenth century, each common sin represented a “throne,” or composite part of Satan's earthly kingdom.Footnote 28
Second, the nature of satanic agency was brought more clearly into focus by the experience of separation from the established church. Enthusiasm for Bible-based piety was forced into Protestantism proper by clerical intransigence. In consequence, reformers became increasingly convinced that a fundamental contrariety existed between their faith and the Catholic Church.Footnote 29 They concluded that Catholicism's doctrines and ceremonies were inherently diabolic, the result of over a thousand years of the Devil's subversion.Footnote 30 This interpretation pervaded English anti-Catholicism, and mirrored Protestants’ experience of a progressive realization that the faith they had once accepted was irredeemably corrupted by the Devil. Thus while they were convinced that the mass was Devil worship, the reformers never argued that it was open apostasy of the sort depicted in the fantasies of the nocturnal meetings of heretics and witches. Instead they sought to expose the existence of a hidden, unwitting apostasy at the heart of Catholicism. False doctrine, rather than inversion, was understood to be the dynamic of institutionalized Devil-worship, in which a genuine Christian piety was covertly diverted onto Satan, unbeknownst to the congregation.Footnote 31
Such an understanding brought the issue of perception to the fore in Protestant demonism. Experience taught the reformers that Catholics were often reasonable and intelligent men, driven by a genuine, if misconstrued Christian faith. How, then, were they sucked into unwitting apostasy? Satan's tactic was so effective because man's spirituality was deeply jaded as a consequence of his fall. Adam's rebellion had deprived man of his spiritual insight, but he remained a creature of God, imbued with a need to worship his creator. Idolatry demonstrated man's helplessness, as the blinded mind latched onto the best approximation of God that it could find. Bishop John Hooper noted that man “imagineth and feigneth God to be like unto the imagination and conceit of his mind … so that the mind conceiveth an idol, and afterwards the hand worketh and representeth the same to the senses.”Footnote 32 The exploitation of this confusion became the first principle of Satan's agency. The divine, Thomas Pickering, in the dedication to William Perkins's Damned Art of Witchcraft, summed up the Devil's hold over man thus:
First he knows that man naturally out of the light of grace hath but a mere soul, imbued only with some general and confused notions, as for matters of deeper apprehension touching God and heavenly things, there is a veil of ignorance and blindness drawn over the eyes of his mind. Whereupon though he be apt to know and worship a God, and learn his will, yet for want of information by the word, he is prone to err in the practice of this notion. Here Satan applies himself to man's measure and at his own will, draws the mind into error by his delusions and impostures.Footnote 33
Driven by Satan, Catholic false doctrine provided the superficial piety and immediacy of God's presence that man's degraded soul yearned for. Around 1538, William Grey, a member of the household of Thomas Cromwell, described in a ballad how the English church was
beguiled with idols
with feigned miracles and lies
by the Devil and his doctors,
the Pope and his proctors:
that with such have blearied our eyes.Footnote 34
Catholicism was a highly convincing fake precisely because its ceremonies were so carefully attuned to man's corrupted religiosity, and its diabolism was so subtly hidden that a special degree of perception was required to discern it. “The subtleties of the Devil must be taken heed of,” John Hooper noted in 1548, “lest he show you God in another form than he showeth himself in his word.”Footnote 35
Thus coming to terms with Catholicism taught Protestants that hidden subversion was by far Satan's most fundamental and dangerous agency. “The Devil is subtle,” noted John Jewel, the bishop of Salisbury, “he will soon deceive you … , when I say man may be deceived, I mean not boys, or children, or fools, or the simplest sort of men; but the learned, the wise, the politic.”Footnote 36
If traditionally the Devil's assaults were a frightening possibility that might never be realized, this approach saw satanic affliction as a near certainty within the life of the average Christian, a certainty that was reflected in the reformed liturgy. The Edwardian prayer books of 1549 and 1552 encompassed a dramatic transformation of the lay experience of the diabolic. For the reformers, the traditional rites and ceremonies of the Sarum Missal failed to express correctly or engage with satanic agency as an intimate experience. They dealt largely with externals, promising an easy victory over the Devil through the mediation of the Virgin, the saints, and the quasi-magical paraphernalia of the sacraments. Instead, the reformed liturgy highlighted the ever-present threat posed by Satan that was to be understood as an integral part of the being a Christian.
Most significantly, by 1552 the baptism ceremony had been reformed, removing the traditional formal exorcism that all children underwent as part of the Sarum rite.Footnote 37 This is well documentedFootnote 38, but the reasons for the demonological changes to the baptism ceremony have never been fully explored. If it was initially driven by a disgust at the arrogance of the clergy—alleged by reformers such as Martin Bucer and Thomas Becon—in usurping from God a power to cast out the DevilFootnote 39, its consequences were more far reaching. Behind these changes lay a fundamental shift in the demonological rationale of Christian initiation. In 1548 baptism constituted a very real victory over Satan, who was literally cast out of the child and denied further access to his soul. The triumphalist language of the Sarum rite is unmistakable. The “accursed Devil” was commanded to remember his sentence of damnation and that “thou has been conquered: trembling and groaning depart: let there be nothing in common to thee and to this servant of God.”Footnote 40 Even if they could not understand the Latin, its contemptuous tone encouraged the congregation to believe that they saw a palpable victory being played out. In reality, of course, Satan might renew his attentions to the initiate at any time, as the sermon stories and the ars moriendi made clear.Footnote 41 But as a self-contained piece of liturgical theater the conquest of Satan was taken to be final.
The exorcism of the 1549 Prayer Book was far less imposing than its predecessor, but it still evidenced a very real victory over Satan.Footnote 42 In 1552, however, there was no attempt to maintain this belief. After a prayer asking God to receive the initiate, the ceremony simply bypassed the exorcism and moved straight to the baptism.Footnote 43 It implicitly denied that exorcism was necessary, and that the minister had power of command over the Devil. But demonism was far from absent. The ceremony was now understood, not as a victory, but as a preparation for a life that would be characterized by perpetual conflict with the Devil. The signing of the cross over the infant, once an exorcism in itself, was now a proclamation of faith, in which the initiate promised “manfully to fight under [Christ’s] banner against sin, the world and the Devil, and to continue his faithful soldier and servant unto his life's end.”Footnote 44 Such a statement was believed more likely to draw Satan's attention than dispel his threat.Footnote 45 After all if Christ was tempted immediately after his baptism, how did ordinary men expect to escape?Footnote 46
Conflict with Satan was not now to be sited at the baptismal font, or in any other ceremony, but within the individual conscience. The baptism prayer asked that God grant the initiate the power to vanquish the Devil himself, implying that mediation of a priest was unnecessary. In a final exhortation explaining the significance of the godparents’ promises on behalf of the child, the nature of the expected diabolic assault was made explicit. Forsaking the Devil involved “continually mortifying all our evil and corrupt affections,” an understanding that focused attention very sharply on the Devil's ability to influence directly the mind, and that made temptation the most common form of diabolic assault.Footnote 47 As the archbishop of York, Edwin Sandys, noted of the Devil in 1574, “so soon as we profess to be Christ's soldiers, as a malicious and fierce enemy he invadeth us.” William Perkins agreed, noting, “forgiveness of sins, and grievous temptations be inseparable companions in this life.”Footnote 48
II
For Protestants, then, temptation expressed the unremitting and intimate nature of Satan's assaults on the individual Christian. “The Devil knoweth all ways how to tempt us,” preached Hugh Latimer, “insomuch that we can begin or do nothing, but that he is at our heels and worketh some mischief.” He could produce, in Thomas Cranmer's words, “sudden and vehement motions to do evil.”Footnote 49 The resulting thoughts could appear at once so alien, but at the same time such an ingrained part of the consciousness, that the victim could not decipher where they originated. By way of illustration, William Perkins described the terrifying effect of the sudden invasion of blasphemous thoughts into the godly conscience, by which Satan “doth greatly astonish them, and bring them to despair.”Footnote 50
Within this scheme diabolic spiritual agency was elevated above physical manifestations.Footnote 51 The Devil's ability to inflict physical harm had scriptural authority in the Book of Job, and Protestants never denied that he could appear as a concrete entity.Footnote 52 Moreover, as William Perkins conceded, the Devil had probably appeared physically to tempt Christ.Footnote 53 But such a statement was unusual within reformed devotional literature. Satanic physicality was downplayed against a general assumption that temptation and spiritual diabolic agency were synonymous. “The Devil is a spirit whom we can neither feel nor see,” Thomas Cranmer warned in 1548. The playwright turned minister Stephen Gosson, noted in 1579 that “the Devil stands at our elbow when we see him not, speaks when we hear him not, strikes when we feel not, and woundeth sore when he raiseth no skin nor rents the flesh.”Footnote 54 Indeed witchcraft narratives stood alone in their insistence that the physical Devil maintained a central place as a tempter and worker of maleficium.
Within the dynamic of temptation itself, Protestant demonism further emphasized direct satanic intrusion into the mind over the manipulation of external stimuli. Either means (or a combination) might effect temptation; as William Perkins noted the Devil “conveys into [a man’s] mind, either by inward suggestion or outward object, the motion or cognition of that sin which he would have him to commit.”Footnote 55 But Protestants’ understanding that temptation was a chronic condition downplayed the significance of individual instances, and these were most likely to be understood as externally induced temptations toward the concrete, such as lust, greed, or avarice. Instead the more consistent and insidious temptations concerning spiritual estate were considered the most significant form of diabolic activity. For example, to assume spiritual security, or to assume reprobation, were equally temptations to the sin of presumption, to claim a greater knowledge of God's plan than He had revealed. Concerned with the fundamentals of faith and faithlessness, such sins were far more grievous than their fleshly counterparts.Footnote 56 Specific sins were significant as symptoms of a sinful lifestyle, and so chronic temptation was characterized as a constant subversion of the godly conscience. Satanically induced thoughts were described as “injections,” or most commonly “suggestions,”Footnote 57 an understanding that emphasized a life-long internal dialogue with Satan, and that subsumed externally induced temptation within this wider subversive scheme.
The notion of internal temptation was not, of course, an invention of Protestantism. On the contrary, it was central to the traditional remit of satanic agency. Theologians from the Church Fathers to Thomas Aquinas argued that temptation (both internal and external) was the truest manifestation of the Devil's policy of opposing God.Footnote 58 In the work of writers such as Augustine and Gregory the Great the dynamic and the experience of internal temptation were described in terms that would be repeated by Protestants in the sixteenth century.Footnote 59 The importance of internal temptation was further reflected in devotional literature. For example, the fourteenth-century Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God predicted a “war of temptations” for the Christian in which the Devil “putteth in our mind divers imaginations, as worldly and fleshly thoughts.”Footnote 60 Similarly, the highly influential fifteenth-century tract, the Ars Moriendi, gave a systematic account of the five temptations the Devil would employ to torment the dying with a sense of the enormity of their sins. Four were presented unambiguously as a diabolic intrusions in which thoughts were placed within the mind.Footnote 61
But while temptation exemplified the Devil's malice, it was never elevated to such a degree that it eclipsed the wider remit of satanic agency. Instead, historians have charted a developing concern with diabolic power among medieval Catholics that focused on the Devil's physicality, and that was maintained in the face of the Reformation. Julio Caro Baroja identifies a progressive, two-stage definition of satanic power in orthodox Christian theology. In the Middle Ages this sought to deny the reality of acts of witchcraft as illusions of the Devil, who primarily worked to deceive the senses.Footnote 62 As the persecution of heresy developed, the reality of the deeds ascribed to servants of the Satan were affirmed by Scholastic teaching and judicial practice, so that absolute doctrine, expressed by theologians such as Aquinas, asserted the physical reality of demonic power. By the end of the sixteenth century, Baroja notes, “there was a positive obsession with the Devil's physical presence in the world.”Footnote 63 Similarly, Robin Briggs argues that post-Reformation Catholics avidly embraced opportunities to show that the Devil was an active corporeal presence as a means of resisting Protestant attempts to separate the physical and the divine.Footnote 64 Again, the importance of the physical Devil was widely reflected in devotional culture. Homiletic literature and the stage provided a central place for the Devil as God's hangman, and as the tormentor of saints.Footnote 65 Moreover, traditional devotional works could even be ambiguous over the question of whether the Devil was most dangerous in the mind or in the outside world. The Dietary of Ghostly Health, published in 1520 by Wynkyn de Worde, assured its readers that a mind constantly remembering Christ's passion was impervious to diabolic intrusion, but that Satan was an inevitable presence in “the material cloister,” and “ye shall have of him more force and stronger battle there.”Footnote 66 Aron Gurevich has noted that the depiction of demons in medieval exemplar and art reflected an inherent tendency to “translate the spiritual into the concretely sensible and material.” Thus stories abounded of demons interacting physically with humans—riding on the backs or clothes of sinners, or crowding around the deathbed—present but unseen by the majority of the protagonists. These Gurevich describes as instances of “double vision,” which erased the border between abstract and object.Footnote 67 The fascination with the grotesque physical demons of the exemplar tales, of the church misericord carvings and doom paintings, and of the mystery plays, probably ensured that a purely spiritual Devil could not gain ascendancy in traditional devotional culture.
In contrast, for Protestant theologians, it was precisely at the point of physicality that the nature of diabolic experience became a gray area. Their reticence over physicality is explained by their desire to give diabolism the widest possible transmission as a palpable experience. Recent work, on witchcraft and on providence, has shown that belief in the physical manifestation of Satan was difficult for Protestants to resist because it was both deeply entrenched in popular culture and could be attuned to reformist agendas. So the emphasis on the role of familiars in English witchcraft represented the accommodation of a popular notion of demons with a clerical and judicial need to discover evidence of apostasy.Footnote 68 Similarly, the appearances of God's Hangman—who visited dire punishments on reprobates—could, interpreted correctly, provide valuable ammunition for the critique of clerical and congregational intransigence in the face of the continuing Reformation.Footnote 69 But the Devil who was hidden in thunderstorms was an irregular and uncertain visitor, as was the Devil who took the shape of a black dog, or came in the night as an incubus. Protestants might be ready to appropriate stories of visitations, but they made no attempt to argue that such experiences were among the norm of satanic activity. Instead they sought to reveal the diabolic nature of the commonplace. Anger, envy, the desire to eat, to have sex, to dance, to give church a miss in favor of the alehouse—these were within the experience of all men and women. If a blanket interpretation of diabolism could be placed upon them, Satan could be brought convincingly into the most intimate aspects of people's lives, and the norm of his agency could be made insidious through the sheer banality of the sinful thoughts he was credited with introducing into the mind. “There is nothing either so high or low, so great or small, but the Devil can use that self-same thing as a weapon to fight against us withal,” concluded Hugh Latimer.Footnote 70 This, of course, had a moralizing agenda, but it was also a response to a genuine concern that the traditional focus on physical demons had lulled Christians into a false sense of security. William Perkins's editor, Thomas Pierson, summed up the danger: “The natural man doth not perceive that working of Satan which doth procure his woe. It may be that he hath seen the players’ and the painters’ devils, some black horned monster with broad eyes, crooked claws or cloven feet; and till such a thing appear unto him, he never feareth hurt by Satan.”Footnote 71 Thus, while Protestant writers fully accepted the possibility of “satanical molestation,” they were careful to incorporate it into the wider scheme of temptation by which man's faith was tested. William Perkins, in his Cases of Conscience, noted that physical encounters with devils could take place in certain locations, but this was because houses and other buildings could suffer from spiritual intrusions as a parallel to internal temptation.Footnote 72 Similarly, those Protestant ministers at the forefront of the attempt to strip the figure of the witch of preternatural power, and attribute maleficium to the Devil, were adamant that the diabolic rationale of maleficium was to torment the mind and drive it to faithlessness.Footnote 73
Moreover, Protestants often betrayed an ambivalence to stories of satanic visitations. For example, Henry Jessey's The exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced (1647) included the testimony of a sufferer who claimed to have inhaled a mysterious smoke that “fluttered” inside her, while “a voice said within me, to my heart, ‘thou art damned, damned.’” Jessey did not dispute the story, but did add a marginal note that explained that another had had the same experience, “but after she judged it was but a fancy.”Footnote 74 Since it was a commonplace of Puritan complaint literature that ingestion—of tobacco or alcohol—was a widespread means by which demonic spiritual intrusion was effected, the example is suggestive of highly complex attitudes to diabolic physicality.Footnote 75 In the scheme that emphasized the Devil's insidious use of the commonplace, it was the extraordinary nature of sudden visitations (in this case that it was brimstone rather than tobacco) that made them problematic.
In order, then, to understand what Protestant writers meant by internal temptation, we need to deconstruct the monopoly of demonological interpretation they claimed over man's everyday experiences. This was an extension of that they claimed over the interpretation of the Catholic Mass, and the clearest example is provided by their attack on popular culture.Footnote 76 In the comforting familiarity and ordinariness of the theater, the alehouse or the maypole, Protestants perceived a real spiritual threat. According to the antistage polemicist Anthony Munday, such entertainments were used by Satan “to beguile us and draw us from the consideration of our estate.”Footnote 77 Protestant writers acknowledged the genuine emotional effect of plays or songs, as they had recognized the appeal of the Mass, but were adamant that this was the key to experiencing temptation. Satan brought poetry to plays “that whatsoever he would have stick fast to our souls, might slip down in sugar by this enticement, for that which delighteth never trouble to swallow.”Footnote 78 In the evocative phrase of the minister of Southfleet, Henry Symons, the effect of these satanic intrusions was to “rub our temples with his opium of poisonous suggestions.”Footnote 79 Such activities threatened to usurp the place of religion within the individual's life, presenting an empty but enticing equation between physical and spiritual comfort, in a parallel of the shallow religiosity offered by Catholicism. The attack on popular culture was a crystallization of a more generally applicable understanding of the dynamic of diabolic temptation. Comforting familiarity, ordinariness, and pleasure were temptation, and therefore were the Devil, and if the godly scheme of interpretation was followed, were readily identifiable as such.
In internal temptation danger was understood to lie in a chain reaction that diabolic intrusion produced in man's corrupted nature. Adam's fall had left each man with a stock of sin that need only be triggered to envelope him. Thus Satan, in Cranmer words, could “set our hearts on fire so suddenly, that we shall not know from whence such sudden fire and sparks do come.” Similarly, William Perkins observed that, “put a burning match to tinder or gunpowder and it will kindle presently, our hearts like tinder do easily suffer corruption to kindle in us.”Footnote 80 The position undermined any sense that temptation could be judged quantitatively. While Protestants acknowledged a scale of sin, they sidestepped any resulting sense of moral relativism with the belief that the consequences of diabolic intrusion were massively disproportionate to any transgression that might be its immediate result. Even those diabolic thoughts that were resisted could prove potentially damaging. “In temptations usually be corrupt motions,” was William Perkins's assessment, “for though a man do not approve, neither entertaining with delight, the Devil's temptations, yet shall he hardly keep himself from the stain or taint of sin, because the imaginations of his own heart are evil.” The potency of this combination of diabolic intrusion and innate human sin focused attention on the Christian's own conscience and demanded that all thoughts be examined in order to discern their true nature. No one was entirely secure in the knowledge of their own godliness, since, without his spiritual insight, man simply floundered, unable to perceive righteousness, let alone follow it.
Thus the rhetoric of internal temptation did not allow for demonic characteristics to be comfortably projected onto external phenomena or marginal figures. While the contrarieties of the churches of God and the Devil, and of the regenerate and the reprobate were ultimately endorsed by Protestant demonism, they could not be understood experientially by a simplistic recourse to “otherness.” Rather by placing Satan firmly within the commonplace, and so emphasizing the inescapability of diabolic experience, Protestant demonism identified difference only in the response to temptation.
III
What response, then, was consistent with godliness? A central argument of both Keith Thomas and Jeffrey Burton Russell is that Protestantism was particularly bad at protecting Christians from the Devil. Russell in particular notes that the removal of traditional ceremonial protectives left the individual to face Satan alone, as he describes it, “naked on a black heath at night, exposed to the winter winds of evil.”Footnote 81 This has been supported implicitly by recent studies, such as that of Eamon Duffy, which have emphasized the profound emotional significance of ceremonies such as Candlemas and Rogationtide, and the significant gap left in religious and communal experience by their removal.Footnote 82 Finally, John Stachniewski, writing on religious despair, has argued that Protestantism's uncompromising emphasis on predestination and damnation isolated its less self-confident adherents since they feared that their experience of despair would be interpreted by the godly as a sign of reprobation.Footnote 83 Of course, there is much truth in this picture, but to argue that Protestantism left its adherents unprotected against the Devil is misleading. While the reformers were concerned to undermine reliance on ceremony and intercession, they did not fail to substitute their own understanding of how the Devil might be fought off. Since they understood the diabolic to be a constant of Christian life, they offered no outright victory over Satan. Instead they had the more limited, but very real, objective of making temptation manageable.
For Protestants, Catholic ritual was unable to provide adequate protection against Satan because it failed to aim its countermeasures at the real site of diabolic conflict. Protection came not from bells or holy water, but from the knowledge that temptation could be put into a soteriological perspective. God allowed diabolic temptation in order to test man's faith, but Satan would never be permitted to tempt a godly man beyond his endurance.Footnote 84 This was stated categorically, as Richard Capel, the author of the frequently republished tract Tentations, noted, no “created power [is] able directly to turn and wind the will of man; it is beyond the sphere of Satan, and quite out of his element to reach so far.”Footnote 85 The correct response, therefore, was to demonstrate an understanding of this by patiently bearing affliction.Footnote 86 To attempt to be rid of the Devil by mechanistic rituals was to subvert the logic of the baptism initiation into spiritual warfare.Footnote 87 For internal temptation was its experiential confirmation, as demonstrated by its disorienting effect on the godly conscience. In the words of William Perkins, “as Satan conveys evil suggestions into men's minds, so the same are full of trouble, sorrow, and vexation, at least to the godly.”Footnote 88 Thus temptation could be taken as a sign of election. Only ungodly men would deny the validity of internal temptation, saying that “they have not perceived any such combat in themselves, though they have been baptized many years a-gone.” They were either so corrupted they did not recognize temptation, or since they were already damned, Satan allowed them to live in peace.Footnote 89
The most important weapon against the Devil was prayer. “Whensoever we be tempted,” Thomas Cranmer advised, “there is no better remedy than to call for God's help, and to say as Christ taught us, ‘Good Lord suffer us not to be lead into temptation.’”Footnote 90 But here there was a marked contrast with the intercessionary prayers studied by Eamon Duffy. As he observes, traditional prayers against the Devil read like litanies or invocations, blurring the line with magic as they approximated spells or charms. The prayers he quotes focus on angelic intercession, for example, “send to my aid Michael, your Archangel, that he may keep, protect and defend me from all my enemies, visible and invisible.”Footnote 91 By contrast the efficacy of Protestant prayers was understood to lie, not in any mechanistic intercessionary power, but in their ability to facilitate the soteriological understanding with which Satan might be resisted. The prayers of the reformed primers read as rehearsals of the Protestant demonological expositions, which is what they were. They began with a factual statement of the commonplace reality of satanic agency, often quoting 1 Pet. 5:8—“Our adversary the Devil goeth about, like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”Footnote 92 In doing so the prayers tended to be proactive, rather than reactive. They promised temptation, and encouraged the vigilance necessary to engage with it rather than avoid it. A Book of Christian Prayers, printed in 1578, made the threshold of the house a boundary with a world entirely made up of temptation. It read, “I must be fain to go abroad among the snares, which the Devil, and his handservant the world have laid for me.”Footnote 93 Such fatalism was to be accompanied by a sense of abjection, as the speaker reminded himself of Satan's overwhelming power. But this was the key to the prayers’ efficacy, for in realizing that only God's power placed a limit on the Devil's assaults, the Christian's sense of the soteriological meaning of temptation was reaffirmed. The knowledge that God would never allow the faithful to be tested beyond endurance should bolster resistance. As a prayer of the 1553 Primer declared, “I therefore, poor and wretched sinner, despairing of my own strength, which is none, most heartily pray thee to endue me with strength from above, that I may be able to, through they help, with strong faith resist Satan.”Footnote 94 This was also how the sixth petition of the Lord's Prayer was to be understood.Footnote 95
In contrast, then, to the traditional emphasis on intercession, the informed hope of Protestant prayers stressed the personal responsibility for engaging with temptation as a soteriological experience, and thereby resisting Satan. Of course, the rigors of this approach could hardly replace the more immediately comforting intercessions of traditional devotion, but Protestantism did provide a clear and consistent scheme for making temptation manageable.
In its consequences for the role of the clergy as a barrier against Satan, Protestant reform turned full circle. The pre-Reformation clergy were set apart by the quasi-magical powers by which they mediated between the concrete and the divine, including their role in exorcism and antidemonic ceremonies. Historians have suggested that the systematic attack on these powers significantly reduced their status.Footnote 96 If this was so, reformed demonism provided a mechanism for reemphasizing the importance of the (now Protestant) clergy in mediating resistance to Satan. If soteriological understanding was the most important weapon, then a highly educated ministry was most likely to possess it. In their scriptural and theological expertise they became repositories of the learning by which the Devil's threat could be countered. The role was one which ministers readily assimilated, as William Pemble described it, “they by their preaching and ministry doe bid defiance to the powers of darkness, they proclaim themselves open enemies to Satan.”Footnote 97 Thus a large amount of afflicted conscience literature, produced in recognition of the anguish sometimes suffered by the godly, was overtly “antidemonic.” Thomas Becon, for example, wrote a tract on temptation, The Christen Knight, after perceiving that godly men were commonly “so turmoiled and tossed with the cruel waves of desperation, that scarcely there remained any hope of salvation in their breasts.”Footnote 98 But ministers were also motivated to write by their own experiences. Pemble's sense of his antidemonic role was informed by long periods languishing under temptation.Footnote 99 Similarly, Richard Capel, who wrote Tentations, suffered a notorious period of temptation while completing his training in Robert Harris's household seminary.Footnote 100 A sense of professionalism prevented most ministers from illustrating their tracts with their own experiences, but the language and format in which they described temptation was intended to reflect the experience of satanic suggestion and subversive thought.
Thus a number of these texts adopted the popular dialogue form and transcribed internal debates that might take place between man and the Devil over the questions of faith and regeneration. Examples were produced by John Bradford and William Perkins: while some of the most sophisticated were in Thomas Becon's The Governance of Virtue, composed in 1543, and the undated Christen Knight. Footnote 101 By the seventeenth century the genre had evolved to produce texts that were immensely detailed and complex. William Gouge's book on diabolic temptation, The Whole Armour of God, incorporated exposition and two separate dialogues. Expounding on the armor of God described in Ephesians, it separated individual aspects such as faith and the gospel, describing them in the abstract. It then gave a theoretical dialogue or “objections” and “answers,” before illustrating the temptations Satan would use against each aspect in dialogues of “suggestions” and “answers.”Footnote 102 Hundreds of separate tempting “suggestions” and “answers” were contained in Richard Baxter's massive conduct book, A Christian Directory (1673). This was probably the most detailed description of temptation to be produced in the period, and it relied on the notion of dialogue for its protraction.Footnote 103
These dialogues were a form of inverted catechism, in which the Devil sought to undermine assurance by highlighting the weakness of the Christian's faith, and the enormity of his sins, and so gave him an opportunity to express his faith in the redemptive power of Christ's sacrifice, and his understanding that only God could know who was damned. The books thus had an immediate utility in mediating the soteriological knowledge by which temptation might be resisted. As Becon noted of his Christen Knight, “whatsoever Satan can object against man is here confuted by the word of God … so that in this little treatise true knowledge may easily be gotten, both how to repel Satan and his cruel darts.” Moreover, the dramatizing of inverted catechizing powerfully reinforced the opportunity offered by temptation for conspicuous demonstrations of faith, a position that, in theory at least, encouraged an engagement with the experience of the diabolic, rather than a retreat from it.
IV
How successfully could the reformers’ demonological ideas be transmitted as a real experience to the laity? Did they assimilate the Protestant emphasis on internal temptation, and to what extent was the ideal of clerical mediation fulfilled? The demonological experiences of the majority of the population were, of course, not recorded, but evidence for a populist potential in narratives of internal temptation can be presented from sources such as popular literature and plays.Footnote 104 For example, internal temptation was central to the populist accounts of murder that circulated in pamphlet and ballad form. Unlike witchcraft cases, murder narratives never depicted the Devil appearing physically nor did they commonly attempt to use demonization to “other” criminals.Footnote 105 Instead, Satan was commonly shown working internally and inflating the criminal's innate sinfulness in the manner described in Protestant devotional and conduct literature.Footnote 106 Internal temptation could even be depicted in a highly visual medium such as the stage. In the play The Witch of Edmonton (1621), the murderer, Frank Thorney, is shown committing his crime after he has been touched by the Devil in the shape of a black dog. The audience sees the Devil's actions while the play's protagonists do not, and Thorney declares that he does not know where his murderous impulse has come from. Thus the audience was invited to adopt the specialized perception of diabolic activity advocated by Protestant writers.Footnote 107 While the reaction of audiences to this material cannot, of course, be known, the depiction of internal temptation was highly consistent, suggesting it found favor with them. Moreover, these narratives themselves cannot be fully comprehended without entering into the world of diabolic temptation depicted in them.
The remainder of this current article will present evidence for the depth, rather than breadth of the assimilation of Protestant demonism. The aspiring literate godly left the most detailed firsthand accounts of diabolic experience, and the Puritan subculture of introspection and spiritual autobiography proved the most fertile ground for the instinctive emphasis on internal temptation. While the writings of the godly tended to be set firmly within a framework that emphasized the spiritual journey from sinner to saint, and hence conventionalized temptation, individual voices do emerge and we can gain a vivid sense of their experience of the Devil.
What was the subjective experience of temptation? Again internal temptation predominated and physicality was a gray area. Some of the godly did become obsessed with fathoming out the extent of their sin, and fear of the Devil could produce in some a heightened sense of his physical presence. Thus the London artisan Nehemiah Wallington accused his father's maid of being Satan incarnate, explaining, “I did think the Devil would come in the likeness of some maid or some beautiful woman, I being so full of lust.” Similarly, Hannah Allen on various occasions heard a knock at the door of “her chamber, voices outside her window,” which she took to be demons coming to drag her to hell.Footnote 108 We should not dismiss the reality of these experiences to those who suffered them, or the visions of the Devil claimed by some on their deathbeds. But encounters with the physical Devil were comparatively rare, and were subject to the same ambivalence of interpretation that characterized the writings of Protestant theologians. Terrifying as these experiences were, the godly were often prepared to reinterpret them later as cases of mistaken identity and symptoms of exaggerated despair.Footnote 109 This was not always the case. The surveyor of Bermuda, Richard Norwood, remained convinced that he had been physically assaulted by Satan, which he described in detail: “sometimes he seemed to lean on my back or arms or shoulder … , in bed sometimes pressing, sometimes creeping to and fro, sometimes ready to take away my breath, sometimes lifting up the bed, sometimes the pillow.”Footnote 110 But even these intense experiences Norwood understood to be an aspect of chronic spiritual temptation. Indeed, he accepted the interpretation he found in Perkins's Cases of Conscience that his physical sufferings stemmed from a demonic possession of his bedchamber rather than himself. When he took to sleeping elsewhere he was no longer troubled physically, but his internal temptations remained constant.Footnote 111
The defining characteristic of temptation in godly testimonies was a lack of control over the mind and will, an often chronic impulse to attitudes and actions that were considered spiritually damaging. Again and again they emphasized the sheer uncontrollability of thoughts introduced into the mind as the most frightening aspect of temptation. “Satan had the power to overwhelm all, as it were, with a thick dark cloud,” Norwood remembered, “and to captivate me in all the powers and faculties of mind and body.”Footnote 112 The minister Samuel Petto recorded the description of temptation of a Puritan, “J.M.”: “I would have believed but could not; I would have put away thoughts of temptation but could not: the temptation grew stronger and stronger, my heart was broken by reason of sorrow; yet for a time, marvellously kept up to strive; I saw I could not hold out, and was ready to yield, and give over the combat.”Footnote 113 The Baptist John Bunyan described in 1666 how a voice in his head urged him constantly to “sell Christ” until he was nearly overwhelmed, “For whole hours together I have been forced to stand as continually leaning and forcing my spirit against it … that by the very force of my mind in labouring to gainsay and resist this wickedness my very body also would be put into action or motion, by way of pushing or thrusting, with my hands or elbows, still answering, as fast as the destroyer said, ‘Sell him’; ‘I will not, I will not, I will not.’ ”Footnote 114 With so much at stake and so little time, Satan's barrier to communion could intrude most viciously on the deathbed. In 1601, as the celebrated Puritan, Katherine Brettergh, lay dying, she was thrown into panic by the belief that the Devil's intrusion had produced a dislocation in her mind between what she might objectively desire and what she could subjectively believe. When asked if she believed the promises of God, she replied, “Oh that I could, I would willingly, but he will not let me.”Footnote 115
While the godly were prone to temptations to carnal sin,Footnote 116 it was intrusive thoughts questioning their election that were the most profound experiences of temptation. The Protestant introspective scheme surely did encourage what John Stachniewski has described as masochistic “one-downsmanship,” in which the godly vied with each other to be the most damned.Footnote 117 Yet we should be careful of underestimating a genuine experience by characterizing it as self-indulgence. It was precisely because the godly devoted so much time and energy to discerning the signs of grace, that the continuing experience of doubt—literally, in spite of their best efforts—gave temptation a real and especial tangibility. The sheer perversity of the experience lent force to the contention that the conscience was being subverted by an intrusive force. Thus Katherine Clarke described satanic temptation with, “when I took up the Bible to read therein, it was accompanied with much fear and trembling; yet being convinced that it was my duty to read God's word, I durst not omit, or neglect it.”Footnote 118 Similarly, the Baptist, Sarah Davy, described how satanic intrusion “robbed” her of the benefit of “many a sermon.” “The Devil suggesteth dreadful things to me against God, and that I am a hypocrite,” Hannah Allen explained when she described temptation to her aunt.Footnote 119 Richard Baxter expressed the imposing sense of perversity in the experience, noting, “in the storm of … temptation, I questioned a while whether I were indeed a Christian or an infidel, and whether faith could consist in such doubts as I was conscious of.” As he prepared for the ministry he found that these intrusions took on an even more insidious character, since as his religious understanding became more sophisticated, Satan no longer assaulted him “with horrid vexing importunity; but by pretence of sober reason.”Footnote 120
Of course, the identification of the satanic voice suggests that the godly were projecting their unwelcome thoughts onto an external force. Darren Oldridge has interpreted internal temptation in this way, and Richard Godbeer has suggested that a correlation can be seen between individual spiritual self-confidence and willingness to take responsibility for sin, rather than projecting it onto the Devil.Footnote 121 Such a psychological explanation must to some extent account for the experience of temptation, but it is ultimately unsatisfactory. For diabolic intrusion did not separate subversive thoughts from the conscience and so relieve cognitive dissonance by externalization. Protestant writers never intended that it should, but rather that it should do the reverse, forcing a self-conscious and often sustained engagement with the experience of sin, guilt, and the demonic. As Richard Capel noted, “most times our temptations are mixt, [the Devil] and we concur and make one act of tempting; the sin finished is his and ours too.”Footnote 122 Godly testimonies reveal the assimilation of this impetus to engagement. At the point at which the Devil's voice was identified the godly felt impelled to meet and attempt to answer it. Thus godly testimonies commonly rationalized temptation into a dialogue in line with the conventions of afflicted conscience literature. But, as we have seen, the format was itself intended to express the experience of resisting subversive thought, and many of the godly's experience of temptation was progressive, rather than static, and dialogue embodied the experience in a particularly meaningful way.
The characterizations given to the satanic voice, therefore, reflected the nature of the temptations godly individuals were experiencing. For example, Richard Norwood characterized the “inward whispering of Satan” as the voice of a gloating tormentor, and his sense of envelopment by diabolic power is transparent: “And for thyself, thou art as surely in my hands and power as ever was any man. Well I may give thee leave to wriggle a while this or that way; better were it for thee to be quiet. Thou shalt no whit avail, but rather increase my rage so much the more to sweep thee away suddenly and torment thee so much more grievously when thou art in hell. And indeed thy time is even at hand. Thou needs not provoke me to make it shorter than it is. Thou shalt speedily see what shall become of thee.”Footnote 123 Few writers could be as evocative as John Bunyan in expressing the progressive internal dialogue in Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners, but his description of the dislocation of subversive thought was thoroughly representative. The Devil changed from a gloating tormentor—“ ‘what care I,’ saith he, ‘though I be seven years in chilling your heart, if I can do it at last; continual rocking will lull a crying child asleep; I will ply it close’ ”Footnote 124—to a sophist—“ ‘If you must perish, never torment yourself so much beforehand, drive the thoughts of damning out of your mind’ ”Footnote 125—to a realist advocating resignation to damnation—“‘Oh Lord,’ thought I, ‘what if I should not [be saved] indeed?’ ‘It may be you are not,’ said the Tempter. ‘It may be so indeed,’ thought I. ‘Why then,’ said Satan, ‘you had as good leave off, and strive no further; for if indeed you should not be elected and chosen of God, there is no talk of your being saved, for it is neither in him that willeth, not in him that runneth, but in God that sheweth mercy.’”Footnote 126
These testimonies give a sense of the potential intensity of internal temptation, but rather than being paralyzed by the experience, many of the godly were able to assimilate it into their lives as a necessary test of their faith. Lady Brilliana Harley understood the soteriological significance of temptation, and expected to experience it. She put together a model in her commonplace book (1622), to act as a template by which she could judge if her response was consistent with election.Footnote 127 Such assimilation was not merely conduct book theory. The diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes recorded for 11 May 1623 that he had attempted to prepare for the sacrament but “alas, such was my weakness and so powerful my roving thoughts, through Satan's suggestion, that I could not receive the due comfort I hoped for.” But the experience does not seem to have troubled him overmuch, and no indication is given that he considered it unusual; in the end he could only hope that God would accept his good intentions.Footnote 128 Most commonly, the godly experienced temptation as cyclical, dissipating and being renewed consistently throughout significant periods of their lives. The diary of Lady Margaret Hoby demonstrates how routine temptation could be. Between early May and August 1602, she experienced temptation on and off as she tried to follow her godly observances. On the sixth of May God “suffered Satan to afflict my mind,” but by her next entry, on the twentieth, he had provided “comfort every way.” The last week in June she summarized with “until this day I have continued in bodily health, notwithstanding Satan hath not ceased to cast his malice upon: temptations hath exercised me, and it hath pleased my God to deliver me from all.” But by the eighteenth of July she felt the early signs of a coming diabolic assault, and her diary offered her an opportunity to prepare for it—“this day I heard the exercises and now, as though Satan would return, I felt his buffets: but I know my God will make them, in the end, profitable to me.” By the end of the month temptation had certainly come upon her, but after August the Devil falls from view, and Margaret does not mention temptation again.Footnote 129
The testimonies of the godly do not support John Stachniewski's picture of the sufferers’ isolation. Temptation became part of the everyday language of godly communities. Rather than isolating victims, it could provide a narrative of recognizable experience that ensured mutual identification between Christians. Sir Simonds D’Ewes recorded in his diary that he spent an evening in January 1624 in “much good discourse about the temptation of the Devil, and how strangely a gentleman of the Middle Temple had been afflicted.”Footnote 130 John Bunyan recounted overhearing a group of women discussing how they had been, “comforted, and supported against the temptations of the Devil; moreover, they reasoned of the suggestions and temptation of Satan in particular, and told each other by which they had been afflicted, and how they were borne up under his assaults.” Here is a picture of a group of people with a common understanding of diabolic activity, able to differentiate between specific temptations, and sharing their experiences under the assumption of mutual understanding. It was Bunyan who felt isolated, fearing his lack of diabolic affliction excluded him from the godly.Footnote 131
It is clear also that the ideal of clerical mediation was to a significant extent fulfilled. The godly did make use of the inverted catechisms and afflicted conscience tracts to understand and meet with their temptations. For example, Brilliana Harley's blueprint of temptation was based on Calvin and William Perkins's Cases of Conscience. Footnote 132 Some of those suffering temptation claimed to have had providential encounters with afflicted conscience literature. The Puritan woman Elizabeth Wilkinson, whose troubles started at the age of thirteen, recorded how her temptations progressed through a number of arguments for her reprobation. As she was tempted to selfishness she encountered Calvin's Institutes, and, when she believed she had been guilty of faithlessness, she happened upon Henry Scudder's The Christian's Daily Walk in Security and Peace, which contained a very detailed description of the sin by which she was able to reassure herself of her innocence.Footnote 133
Clerical mediation manifested more immediately in the parish, and was the focus of extensive support networks for those languishing under temptation. Richard Norwood, himself suffering, chanced upon a preacher in London whose message, that affliction did not indicate reprobation, was so pointed that he suspected the sermon was aimed at a specific parishioner.Footnote 134 Another important pastoral role involved offsetting the temptations to despair that could sometimes intrude upon the deathbed. Katherine Brettergh was ministered to by Edward Aspinwall, who, it was reported “comforted her at all times with apt places of scripture, meeting with her temptations, and so put the sword of the spirit into her hand.”Footnote 135 Ministers had the moral authority to evaluate the laity's temptations as signs of election. Thus, in order to refute “uncharitable” speeches, William Harrison noted in his funeral sermon for Brettergh that “the Devil most assaulteth them which be most godly, thinking to hinder all religion if he may prevaile.”Footnote 136 Elizabeth Wilkinson prepared a narrative of her experiences in order to be able to take communion in Robert Harris's public assembly at Oxford. Harris, who had a reputation for being able to comfort people in temptation, was particularly impressed by the way in which Wilkinson's life seemed to exemplify the temptation of the godly. “In Satan, thou seest his most ordinary way and method in tempting,” he commented when he passed the narrative on to a friend, God “permitteth these Hellish Scullions to scour his plate, and to fit the vessels of honour for their master's use.”Footnote 137 We may assume that he told Wilkinson much the same thing.
Thus temptation could be perceived as valuable and rarefied experience.Footnote 138 The developing genre of the “godly life,” a Puritan hagiographical treatment of exceptional ministers and laymen, accepted that diabolic temptation offered its victims privileged spiritual insight that went some way to redressing man's corruption. As Richard Greenham noted, “when one hath been exercised with many temptations he can discern others.”Footnote 139 This was particularly pronounced with regards to the deathbed, in which the transitional stage between life and death seems to have been seen as a period of heightened spiritual perception as impending dissolution brought the dying closer to a knowledge of God. Thus the words of the dying were avidly reported in pamphlets and sermons, and their struggles with, and victories over the Devil were regarded as especially edifying.Footnote 140
The very engagement with the experience of temptation, at both a personal and public level, gave zealous Protestants at least, a viable means of managing diabolic experience. The sense of internal dialogue and spiritual intrusion, and the intensification of the soteriological meaning of temptation, provided them with a rationale for active resistance. Where the loss of control over thought was the most terrifying symptom of demonic intrusion, the wilful reimposition of control, informed by soteriological understanding, could be a profound religious experience. For Katherine Brettergh, a sense of an internal dialogue with Satan provided her with something to cling to, since it allowed her to exercise some degree of control over her thoughts by publicly withdrawing from the conflict. She apparently said, “Satan reason not with me, I am but a weak woman, if thou have anything to say, say it to my Christ, he is my advocate, my strength, and my redeemer, and he shall plead for me.”Footnote 141 Others were inspired to be more proactive in their resistance to Satan. The Puritan minister Phillip Stubbes published an account of his wife's, Katherine’s, last combat with the Devil that is suggestive of the theater that could surround the public expression of the dialogue with Satan. The onlookers were made aware of Satan's approach by the change in Katherine's face, as she “bent the brows, she frowned, and looking (as it were) with an angry, sterne, and fierce countenance, as though she saw some filthy, ugglisome and displeasant thing.” She then burst into a lengthy tirade against Satan, turning the dialogue on its head by tormenting rather than being tormented. She repeated the temptations he offered, for the benefit of those watching—prefacing them with “how now Satan?” and “what sayest thou more, Satan?”—before demolishing them by claiming her assurance of election had made her bold enough to treat him with disdain. Understanding that sin was a trial that beset the godly only in the world, she pursued the logic and took the unusual step of bequeathing to Satan the sins that she no longer needed since her dissolution was near. Since it was Satan who had first provided her with sin, their return was to effect a dramatic public severance of any relationship with the Devil, marking the culmination of her role as a Christian soldier, and so taking the logic of Protestant demonism to its most extreme conclusion.Footnote 142
V
English evidence suggests, therefore, that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did see the emergence of a distinctively Protestant demonism, and that this was the product of a sharpened experiential sense of intimate satanic agency and the hidden dangers of commonplace religious and secular practices. In its emphasis on internal temptation, it mitigated against the functionalist projection that historians have argued defined people's relationship to the Devil. It involved a self-conscious engagement with Satan, which was deliberately focused on the most intimate possible experience of the diabolic. It also allowed nothing to stand between the Devil and the individual Christian, who was ultimately responsible for discerning temptation for what it really was. Rather than, as we might expect, privileging the inner most thoughts as the fundamental expression of the self, the Protestant Devil threatened to turn the consciousness into the subverter of godliness. Such an agency was too invasive to allow for the comfortable projection of negative experiences away from the individual. It also mitigated against inversion by refusing to idealize a godly alternative of a life freed from temptation. Indeed those who did not suffer under the Devil were the most likely to be damned. This picture of temptation was central to how many of the godly, with conscious support from the ministry, interpreted their experiences of trying to live up to the demands of being a member of the elect. We should be careful of assuming that oppositional pictures, incorporating concepts such as contingent reality and God's ape, are definitive. The emphasis on temptation suggests that for a significant number of Protestants, the Devil could be profoundly felt as an insidious force in their everyday lives, threatening precisely because he could not readily be reduced to an oppositional symbol.
